HEALING

Greg Montgomery: The Phone Call that Changed Everything

By Amy Reid and Gorman Woodfin The 700 Club

CBN.com
 By most people’s standards, Greg Montgomery was a successful man. He had a booming photography business, a beautiful family and was a talented musician. But one day, out of the blue, his life changed…

“My hands started to go numb,” he says. “I’m a finger-style guitar player so I pick out the individual notes with a certain finger. I started to notice a little bit in my hands as I was playing, and I didn’t quite feel the string like I should. I was a pretty heavy smoker at that time, and I thought maybe that the smoking was starting to affect blood flow or something.”

Greg and his wife didn’t worry too much about all this until he began experiencing double vision. “I got up to go to work, and I noticed two clocks.

"Being a photographer obviously I depended on my eyes, and I saw everything going away -- the business and the ability to work.

“I went to see my optometrist to start. He knew something was going on. So he sent me to another doctor.

Greg made an appointment with a specialist….

“I’d been on the Internet researching, and I had narrowed it down to either MS or a brain tumor. So I went in there knowing that I had one of the two.”

The doctor confirmed that Greg had Multiple Sclerosis—but the diagnosis was more than he ever expected.

“That was just devastating news. I’m a musician, and I’d already started to lose the ability to play. Now he’s telling me I was going to lose the ability to walk. Pretty devastating.”

Greg didn’t know which way to turn. Without faith of his own, he leaned on his wife Barbara for support. Then one day he got a phone call from a total stranger.

“The phone rang, and this gentleman was on the phone. He said, ‘I’m not really sure why I called but, you know, I just felt like I was supposed to.’

“I felt comfortable with him for some strange reason. I told him about the diagnosis of MS. He said, ‘Now I know why I’ve called.’ He gave me scriptures on healing. He sent me a tape that he had done, and Barbara had a CBN tape from Integrity Music.

“I was on my way to Montgomery, Alabama, to a shoot, and so I took those tapes with me to listen and try to get my thoughts together.”

As he drove and listened to the tapes, Greg started thinking.

“I realized that I couldn’t do this by myself. So driving down I-85 at about 85 miles an hour I asked the Lord into my life. It was amazing the instant change that I felt. Nothing changed physically at all, but I just felt a release of the weight that was on me.”

Although Greg’s heart had changed, he viewed his deteriorating physical condition as inevitable. Until one night, in a motel room...

“I was watching CBN, and I just really felt led to call and ask for prayer. I called about the business. We had prayer.

"I’d never asked for prayer about the MS because it, in reality had been a good thing. That’s what brought me back to the Lord. So we had another prayer just about the MS.

"I felt this warming sensation going all through me. It wasn’t dramatic; it was just very subtle.”

After the prayer was over….

“I felt something in my spirit telling me to get up and so I did. With my MS, I didn’t feel my feet and my hands hardly at all. But I felt the motel room floor. I walked around the room a little bit, and I danced around the room a little bit. I shouted around the room.”

Greg was overjoyed. But the next morning…

“My feet were numb and my balance was off. I grabbed my cane and went to work just like I’d done for the past year.

“That evening when I got back to the motel, I called Barbara and told her about what had happened to me the night before. She yelled at me, 'Why didn’t you claim it? Claim it as your healing. That was your healing.' And so that’s what I did.

"Over the next two or three days, things started to work. I’d tell my feet to move, and they’d move. My fingers would move.

"When I got home that next week we walked to the top of Kennesaw Mountain. I took my cane with me but I carried it. We had pretty good church when we got to the top."

It’s been seven years since that day, and Greg hasn’t had any more symptoms of MS. He and Barbara are grateful to God for his healing and for the joy Greg has found in following Christ.

"The old Greg was to impress as many people as I could, to make you think that I’m somebody. It was indeed an 'all about me' person. The Lord changed all that to where it’s not about me at all. It’s all about Him."